Nutritional recommendations for n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and the challenge to the food industry.

There are no internationally recognized nutritional recommendations for h-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) simply because the evidence pointing to nutritional requirement in man is mainly only recently derived. The purpose of the present paper is to summarize that evidence and to consider the opportunities and difficulties of incorporating n-3 long-chain PUFA in foods. The present paper will only give a brief account of the history of this subject and will concentrate particularly on the outcome of two major international conferences which took place in the latter half of 1988, to which the world’s leading experts were invited. The first was organized by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as an advanced research workshop held in Italy in June 1988 (Galli & Simopoulos, 1989)’ and the second was organized by Actu Medicu Scandinuvica, restricting the invitation to fifty leading medical workers active in this area, which took place in Norway in August 1988 (Nordoy & Dyerberg, 1990). We will try to present an overall picture of the messages coming from these conferences.